Flat World schools textbook publishers with free Web editions

Picture yourself as a college student, staring down at the syllabus for a class on banking and the financial system. It contains some good news: the course textbook won't need to be purchased from the college bookstore, saving you an instant $80. Instead, the book is freely available on the Web, though you can also choose to buy a print edition, an audio version, flash cards, or an unencrypted PDF. Would you plunk down your money, or just tough it out with the online textbook?

That might sound simple, but it means doing a host of things still too risky for most textbook publishers:

Making free versions of the text available online, and under a Creative Commons license that allows sharing

Providing PDFs without DRM in order to work on everything from a Kindle to a netbook

Selling print and audio formats in whole-book form or chapter-by-chapter

Keeping print prices low ($29.95 for a bound black-and-white book).

After beta-testing the concept for two semesters and one summer school session, Flat World found that most students are willing to drop some cash on extra materials so long as the prices are right, but a significant fraction of students is willing to read the Web-only textbooks. CEO Eric Frank tells Ars that the three trials involved 500 students in Fall 2008, 750 students in Spring 2009, and 3,500 students in Summer 2009. As students and professors grew more familiar with the Flat World approach, purchasing patterns increased quickly.

By the Summer 2009 test, a full 65 percent of all students were placing orders for additional materials; two-thirds of these orders were for print copies of the textbook, while the remaining third went to PDFs and study aids. The students who did buy something spent an average of $30—well below the cost of a typical college textbook. In total, 56 percent of these students went without a traditional print textbook.

The results have aligned "with what students said they would do," says Frank, who believes the future of the textbook industry is all about student choice. Locking students into particular formats, such as a specific e-reader like the Kindle, isn't what the students want. In his view, the solution is to offer Web content to those on a budget or for those who don't want to lug a book to the library on a particular day, but to also make print, PDF, and audio versions available at reasonable prices. Teachers can also customize the books, changing text, hyperlinks, assignments, and examples to craft a book that fits best with their own particular class.

This level of customization is also a competitive advantage for Flat World. Publishers have traditionally sold only the paper editions of books, and after a few semesters in print, students buy mostly used copies (from which the publishers make no revenue). Flat World hopes to mitigate this issue and produce a steadier revenue by offering so many customization options and by keeping prices low. If Dr. Kerbopple's Econ 101 uses a customized textbook, print copies can't be resold, even to students in other sections of the same course at the same school. But if prices remain low enough, students won't mind; selling a book for a mere $15 doesn't seem worth it anymore, especially when it contains all of one's notes and highlighting.

According to the company's research, Flat World's approach has decreased average textbook costs to $18 per student per class, down from more than $100 under traditional models. While it has yet to go truly mainstream, the company is out of "beta" and is scheduled to provide content to 40,000 students at more than 400 colleges this upcoming semester.

college textbooks are, and always will be, a SCAM. straight up. but at least this way you can wait and see if you actually NEED the text before you buy a print version or if the prof just puts it on the curriculum to look cool.

Two few difference with Gutenberg : Gutenberg deals with out-of-copyright works, and does not pay authors / content producers for producing anything, which limits the range of available authors.

While there are plenty of subjects that involve studying primary texts that are out-of-copyright, even those subjects tend to have more modern critics as part of their curriculum.

[I'm not saying that a completely free and open source education system is impossible, but it would require some organisation and the dedication of expert resources to it, some of whom are only going to be motivated by people paying for their time. That could be as simple as the institutions paying for 1 hour of time per week for teachers and lecturers dedicated to contributing or reviewing curriculum content]

As for whether college textbooks are a SCAM. It depends what you mean.

You are talking books that :

(a) have relatively high production costs compared to a novel (from writing and research to ideally needing editing/review by someone qualified to do so, through to more complex layout)

(b) have small print runs over which the production costs can be divided. In some cases, for final year options in specialised subjects, you are probably talking in the low 3 figures.

(c) in most cases, a limited shelf-life (there are few classics - consider programming)

Against that, of course there is the fact that often there is a monopoly going on - especially in niche areas - but what I think is daft is pretending that the problem of production is going to go away because we've solved the problem of distribution.

college textbooks are, and always will be, a SCAM. straight up. but at least this way you can wait and see if you actually NEED the text before you buy a print version or if the prof just puts it on the curriculum to look cool.

Dude, a lot of textbooks take profs years to put together. You don't just write a textbook in a few hours. Most textbooks, in my experience at least, were available at the library. Even the annotated versions of books where the literature itself has the copyright expired require an awful lot of hours to put together. Why don't you try writing a book and then ask yourself how you'd feel if folks copied it without giving you your due.

Go figure that folks actually expect to get money for their hard work. Welcome to capitalism.

Originally posted by wordsworm:Dude, a lot of textbooks take profs years to put together. You don't just write a textbook in a few hours. Most textbooks, in my experience at least, were available at the library. Even the annotated versions of books where the literature itself has the copyright expired require an awful lot of hours to put together. Why don't you try writing a book and then ask yourself how you'd feel if folks copied it without giving you your due.

Go figure that folks actually expect to get money for their hard work. Welcome to capitalism.

I'm sure there are noble stories right along side the evil stories. The Finance class (required for all Bus majors) at the local (large) state uni uses a book written by the prof that includes an access code that can't be reused. $180 book, no resale value. Close to 800 students per semester paying a high price for a book where resale has been deliberately disabled. If that book is used at another school, all the more money for the jerk.

It's a great concept for classes you just need to take but couldn't care less about keeping the book for.

It seems to me they might be assuming (a little) that if they offer it for free on the web, they'll eventually get enough people that are so sick of web-based formats that they'll shell out money for a paper copy.

I welcome anything that helps to reduce costs for students and their parents. Education costs have risen almost as fast as medicine and health care.I think that there are too many fingers in the pie. Authors obviously deserve to be compensated for their hard work, but there is a huge existing gaggle of others profiting too. They didn't write the book but they get as much or more than the author does from it's sales.The ultra-high costs of books only serve to hobble the American education system.

Having done some work for and in the text book industry I can say this is a good thing. The text book industry is to education as the fashion industry is to clothing. Authors are picked based on who's hot (not strictly merit) and a new line-up (i.e. edition) is released every year. However until recently students were forced to buy the equivalent of runway suits and gowns where as most of them just need a pair blue jeans. Perhaps Flat World is the new Levi's?

Originally posted by wordsworm:What exactly are they offering that Gutenberg doesn't aside from the option to purchase extras?

Surely the option to purchase extras would be enough to build a business off of? It seems like these guys looked at their market, identified what it wanted, and saw that they could make a profit off of it.

(a) have relatively high production costs compared to a novel (from writing and research to ideally needing editing/review by someone qualified to do so, through to more complex layout)

(b) have small print runs over which the production costs can be divided. In some cases, for final year options in specialised subjects, you are probably talking in the low 3 figures.

(c) in most cases, a limited shelf-life (there are few classics - consider programming)

Your points explain the high price. They don't explain why there needs to be a new edition (especially in non-technical fields) every 2 years. That's the number one thing that screams SCAM to me. Plus, limited shelf life isn't much of an issue if they aren't coming out with new versions all the time.

I think the main thing about this that excites me is the availability of PDF versions. Textbooks are annoying to me primarily because you cannot search them, and this rectifies the problem. Too, except for a few very interesting ones, I do not want or need to keep giant textbooks long term. If I had cheap PDFs for textbooks throughout college I would have a much better collection by now than I currently do.

If my textbooks had been available as PDFs I would still have them. I sold them for the money but also lugging them around every time I moved was a pain.I had all my books to move. Fiction is so much more fun that school books. Plus personal computers were in their early infancy then. 1976-Carrie

I'm curious to hear the other side of it. What does a Trigonometry book add from year to year that the publisher needs to write another edition? I only see a new edition (6th edition, wtf?!?!?) as forcing students to buy a "new" book instead of the used one. I understand that a language evolves over time as words take on new meaning due to culture and slang but numbers do not unless I am mistaken and "5 is the new 3"?

Personal experience:Two years after I graduated from college a friend started and needed to buy an Accounting 101 book. I still had mine so I gave it to them, 2 editions behind the current but through the entire course they were unable to find a difference in the book while taking the course. Saved them well over a hundred dollars.

Originally posted by Julian Lawton:As for whether college textbooks are a SCAM. It depends what you mean.

You are talking books that :

(a) have relatively high production costs compared to a novel (from writing and research to ideally needing editing/review by someone qualified to do so, through to more complex layout)

(b) have small print runs over which the production costs can be divided. In some cases, for final year options in specialised subjects, you are probably talking in the low 3 figures.

(c) in most cases, a limited shelf-life (there are few classics - consider programming)

Against that, of course there is the fact that often there is a monopoly going on - especially in niche areas - but what I think is daft is pretending that the problem of production is going to go away because we've solved the problem of distribution.

You are missing one very, very important point: textbooks are assigned by professors, (who, as a matter of policy, are never told the price to students of the textbooks) and are typically required for a given course. Students thus have a highly inelastic demand for the textbook--since textbooks are often used for assignments and such, and since professors tend to present material as presented in such a textbook, other textbooks are very poor substitutes.

This, of course, is to be expected: the person making the choice for the textbook is not the one paying for that choice, so cutting the price of, say, a calculus textbook doesn't make it any more likely that your textbook will be selected.

So it is a scam? Well, no, just market power and unaligned incentives.

Originally posted by nafhan:Your points explain the high price. They don't explain why there needs to be a new edition (especially in non-technical fields) every 2 years. That's the number one thing that screams SCAM to me. Plus, limited shelf life isn't much of an issue if they aren't coming out with new versions all the time.

To the best of my knowledge, they do not have new editions for non-technical fields every two years. Most of the technical textbooks that I bought in college were updated every other year because the subject was advancing that fast. Even for my biochemistry classes it wasn't fast enough.

There is strong interest in academia towards 'Open Textbooks'. Students in various states have formed PIRGs (Public Interest Research Groups) to support this and other issues of importance for them. Please see http://www.studentpirgs.org/ for more info.

A few of comments on the comments of others. I'm going to mark these as 'Pro' and 'Con' for whether I think this point strengthens the position of the publisher:

- (Pro) Contrary to what is apparently the majority opinion in this thread, I like the name "Flat World." It evokes a sense of evening the playing field and changing the accepted wisdom about how things are. Sure, the world isn't flat, but it's a fresh way to approach the issue without using an over-used phrase (eg. "one world").

- (Pro) I recognize there are some fields where things do change rapidly, but I would venture that this is the exception rather than the rule, even in technical fields and particularly at the undergraduate level. In many fields the foundations are secure (the trigonometry example above was a good one) and undergraduates, who may be on a tight budget and are more likely to sell their books back anyway, aren't going to be learning about cutting-edge research in differential geometry.

Looking around my desk right now I have a mixture of books about electrodynamics (Jackson, 3rd edition, (c) 1998, the 1st was published in 1962, and this is THE graduate physics text for the topic), statistical mechanics (also an established field, with little that non-practitioners would get in a graduate course, let alone an undergraduate course) and computer languages (Python book is quickly going out of date, LaTeX book likely never will, even if it should).

- (Pro) Most of my time is spent looking things up. I rarely sit down and study from one single book. My preferred way of working would be to have the electronic file that would always be with me (on my laptop) that I could look-up at home or at work.

- (Pro) I understand that it's a lot of work to write a book, but the authors are generally compensated by their institution through rank advancement, bonuses or merit raises. The best books should and will be bought more frequently by practitioners in their fields, and are more likely to be kept.

However, when you go to the mass-market undergraduate texts, things change. The market should dictate that the best books cost more, or the more specialized ones (smaller market) should cost more, but it doesn't work that way in practice. If I can buy the best book on the subject for ~$150, why should I shell-out $120 for a marginal one? And it seems a lot depends on whether the publisher can convince a department to use that book.

There are some notable exceptions to this. Some of the most widely owned and cite books are Dover books, some of which are not that old. Virtually everyone who uses the finite element method has a copy of Tom Hughes' book, which is a relatively cheap Dover. While it is no means a bad book, and Hughes is one of the leading experts in the field, there are many other good books on the subject which aren't as widely owned or cited.

- (Con) The advantage of going with an established publishing house in specialist topics is that you (hopefully) get a well-edited book, and (hopefully) one written by a true expert in the field. For me, this is the key: I hope the published book is good (I know there are many exceptions). Part of the editing process should be filtering the author.

- (Con) What if I write a really good book and distribute it through Flat World? Will my institution recognize it in the same way it would as if I had published it through Prentice-Hall, Wiley or Springer? My suspicion is that it would not, particularly if the editing is not perceived to be as strong.

If mass-market undergraduate texts all go the way of Flat World then publishers will likely be forced to charge more for specialist books. Over time the publishing houses will struggle the same way the newspapers are now. The net result may be that most of the publishing houses go out of business and the ones that do not will have to be more selective in which books they publish, as they will need to be sure there is a market. I can see two problems resulting from this, overpowering one advantage:

- (Pro) Selectivity will be higher, so presumably fewer marginal texts will be published.

- (Con) Some potentially good books will never be published or written.

- (Con) As people won't stop writing, available e-books will likely be analogous to books of the 20th century, in the same way that blogs now are to newspapers. Yes, there will be good quality books out there, but they will be harder to find.

In summary, this looks like the logical evolution for mass-market undergraduate texts, I think this is a great idea, provided the quality of the books and editing are high. As an undergrad I was always short on cash, so I would definitely have benefited. I love the ideas of having it all on my laptop, and the richness of the possibilities for presentation that are limited in text books.

Yes, there are downsides, but books will still be written, and professors will still be paid, and universities will adapt. The biggest differences will likely be that there will not be the big pay-outs to those few authors who publish large runs, and most books, good and marginal, will likely suffer from poorer editing.

This aspect of book publishing is no longer true, at least in the sciences and engineering. Universities couldn't care one bit whether you publish a book or not. What really matters is grant money. Even teaching doesn't matter anymore, so long as it isn't awful. Tenured positions are based almost entirely on the ability of a professor to bring in grant money, even the quality of the research doesn't matter so much anymore so long as the $$ are there.

"- (Pro) I understand that it's a lot of work to write a book, but the authors are generally compensated by their institution through rank advancement, bonuses or merit raises. The best books should and will be bought more frequently by practitioners in their fields, and are more likely to be kept."

>>brentK>>>>I understand that it's a lot of work to write a book, but the authors are >>generally compensated by their institution through rank advancement, >>bonuses or merit raises.

Actually, not usually true. Writing a textbook, at most universities, does not constitute what the university sees as being "published", and therefore they are not compensated by the university for their authorship, nor given raises or bonuses based on textbook authorship. "Publishing", insofar as universities see it, means publishing *research*. Generally, universities don't reward textbook authorship, unless the writing of the book required a *significant* amount of research, which usually only applies to upper-division texts. When I was in college I asked a prof about the book he was writing. He told me that it wouldn't help him with his tenure, and that in fact the school frowned on it a little because it took away from his time in the classroom.

>>In many fields the foundations are secure (the trigonometry example above >>was a good one) and undergraduates, who may be on a tight budget and are >>more likely to sell their books back anyway, aren't going to be learning >>about cutting-edge research in differential geometry.

Your argument here focuses on the content of the books based on whether the *data* in the books has changed. While it could be argued that trig is the same trig we learned 50 years ago, the fact is that the pedagogical devices, methods of increasing student retention and engagement, and ancillary materials have all improved and continue to improve regularly. Yes, a "new edition" of a trig book may fundamentally cover the same material, but authors often improve their presentation of the material and the associated content (including improving graphics, problems, solution sets, and examples) from one edition to the next. Plus, a lot of new editions of books come with study tools and other online enhancements, which all cost something for the textbook companies to produce. They or the authors should be compensated for their materials. Otherwise, the publishing company would cease to exist, thereby limiting the number of publishers that are out there... which would actually cause a long-term *increase* in the price of books.

At least some publishing companies are doing something about it. Some companies are starting rental programs for their textbooks to keep costs for students down, according to that article. That sounds like a good thing to me.

How much of the $150 cost goes into the physical production of a book? If publishing houses just wrote the textbooks and then published them into PDFs, the reproduction cost is substantially cheaper.

So how much markup is there on a $150 text vs. a $30 PDF? What price would a PDF have to be to maintain the same profit margin as a physical bound book, if all students purchased the PDF and there was no reproduction cost?

I would be fine paying $30 for a PDF textbook if the print edition was more than $100, but I would balk at spending more than $50.

This is the same gripe I have with MP3s being $1. There's no packaging. There's no transporting. There's no raw material. Why am I still paying full retail CD price? The copy was pretty much free to make. It should be the same for textbooks.

The main cost of a book is not in the physical production, it is in editing, art work and marketing. That's why e-books are not significantly cheaper than paper books. Author royalties are also not significant, 5% of the retail price, see this site for an actual example:

With the money a student saves on textbooks, he or she would probably have enough to buy a premium ebook reader in one semester (assuming it's real money, not scholarship funds with limitations)... which would then make later ebook buying so much more palatable. This could be a big deal, for sure.

I'm in the middle of moving house right now, and if I'd had PDFs available at reduced prices when I went through school (and if Kindles were out) I'd know I'd have significantly fewer boxes to move now, because I'd have gone electronic for most of my other books and magazines after. And yet buying a Kindle today for future use still turns me off a bit, simply because they haven't reduced the price of regular ebooks compared to paper versions enough to make me think I'll recover that money for a long time. My back is trying to persuade me otherwise, however...

Originally posted by Unreal:At least some publishing companies are doing something about it. Some companies are starting rental programs for their textbooks to keep costs for students down, according to that article. That sounds like a good thing to me.

Sure does. Besides keeping the upfront costs low, you could be reasonably sure that the book you're getting is the most updated version at the time of rental. They could also make money off conversions, where people like the book so much they decide to keep it and pay the fee, which could be a lot lower if publishers figure those books are going to be kept by people who want them, and not resold into the secondary market.

One aspect of the "collegiate textbooks" as a scam that hasn't been touched upon is the payola. The relationship between publishers and colleges is similar to that of big pharma and doctors. You get a publishing/pharma rep hawking their drugs/books to a college/doctor with the promise of all kinds of kickbacks. From pens, key chains, post-its, and other doodads to fully paid trips to seminars and the like.